Croydon Dinner Club experiment

The result of typing "dip hand
experiment" into Google image search.

As some of you who follow my personal account on Twitter may know, I have recently decided to dip my hand and try out a little social experiment.

For the past few months I've been to a few social gatherings and networking organised through Twitter. The idea being that people of a similar interest meet other people of a similar interest over a breakfast, dinner, lunch, that sort of thing. The whole thing sounds frightfully "blind-date-ish" but actually it's pretty good!

We've reached a point in society which has been ever growing, where everyone is afraid of their neighbours, where the news has convinced us that everyone will eat our unborn children and/or put a bomb under our bed. Meeting people in a new environment with a very loose connection was surprisingly good!

Now, I've been to business networking events before and I'm very happy in them, coming away often with a buzz of "anything is possible!!" But when that safety net of "we are here for business" is taken away and it's just getting to meet people, that's where it gets interesting.

Inspired by the good work of Jonny Rose in his mission to make neighbouring Purley a more socially engaged town, I have taken part of the mantel up for Croydon by introducing the Croydon Dinner Club.

The idea of this and from what was done in Purley, is to get people engaged with social media and in Croydon to come out and meet others face to face over a plate of good food. With Croydon being all over the news recently, but still with seemingly large divides in many social areas, it seemed like this needed to happen.

So the first one is planned for the 27th March. If you're interested to see how this develops, you can check out the twitter feed for the event: @CroydonDC and follow how it progresses through that.

If you're thinking about setting up a dinner club in your town or City, feel free to get in contact - I will gladly help out!